The backstory of the new telling of Jack Ryan‘s origin story is becoming quite an origin story of its own. Paramount has been trying to kickstart the rebirth of the Jack Ryan franchise for two years — it stalled out in 2002 with the Ben Affleck-led The Sum of All Fears.

Now the latest screenwriter to try to stick an adrenaline needle in the franchise’s nearly-flatlined chest is David Koepp. But is he doctoring the script, or starting from scratch? Read More »

After the success of Star Trek, Paramount decided to enter the Chris Pine business in a serious way. The company set the actor to star in Star Trek 2 and tapped him for the reboot of Tom Clancy‘s Jack Ryan character, who had previously been played by Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford and Ben Affleck. But development of the Jack Ryan film has been more difficult than perhaps the studio expected, and now it sounds like that film is being pushed back to make way for a fall shoot for Star Trek 2. Read More »

Briefly: Paramount has been working on a revamp of Tom Clancy‘s Jack Ryan character. Chris Pine is starring, making him the fourth actor in the role after Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford and Ben Affleck, and Lost‘s Jack Bender is directing.

Hossein Amini wrote a draft, then the studio picked up Adam Cozad‘s spec script Dubai, which the scribe reworked into a Jack Ryan film called Moscow. He and Anthony Peckham have both done additional work after that Moscow draft came together. Now it looks like Steve Zaillian will do a pass on the draft, and hopefully leave it in shooting shape. Read More »

Briefly: Lot of news coming out of Viacom’s quarterly earnings report today. For gamers, there’s the news that Viacom is looking to sell Rock Band developer Harmonix. On the movie side, Viacom COO Tom Dooley listed several films that Viacom and Paramount are looking to have produced for release after September 2011. They include the Platinum Dunes version of TMNT, the new Jack Ryan film, and sequels to GI Joe and Zoolander. Guess that ends part of the speculation about Zoolander 2. Otherwise, this is merely a progress report for other films.

These movies are all in the script stage at best. Art Marcum and Matt Holloway have been writing TMNT for Platinum Dunes; Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick are writing GI Joe 2 (what aren’t they writing?) and Justin Theroux is writing and planning to direct Zoolander 2. The Jack Ryan film is farthest along, as it has Jack Bender set to direct Chris Pine, but that’s also in a rewrite stage, with Anthony Peckham tapped for a new draft at the end of September. Expect that one to go into production first. The earnings call also mentioned Star Trek 2, but didn’t offer any new reports — that’s in the script stage now, too. [THR]

Anthony Peckham is one of the credited screenwriters on last year’s Sherlock Holmes reinvention and now he’s going to have his name on Paramount’s reinvention of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan character, too. Peckham has been hired to polish up the draft of the script that will put Star Trek‘s Chris Pine into Jack Ryan’s shoes. Read More »

Assuming that the majority of this information is valid, there are going to be about two dozen worth of news stories crammed in one here, so brace yourselves.

According to a leaked email exposing Paramount’s upcoming movie slate, they’re going to be pretty busy over the next few years, working on a slew of potentially promising projects that are either set to go ahead or awaiting further script developments. Find out which of their films you have to look forward to after the break. Read More »

For the past couple months, a shortlist has been going around of possible directors for Moscow, Paramount’s new film / reboot of the film series featuring Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan character. (Chris Pinestars as Ryan this time out.) The names were generally all big: Sam Raimi, Gore Verbinski, Timur Bekmambetov and Kevin MacDonald, for example.

The name that wasn’t on one of the main lists going around is Jack Bender, who exec produced Lost and directed many episodes of the show. But now he’s reportedly the guy closest to sitting in Moscow’s director’s chair. Read More »

There’s been no small amount of speculation about what the previously untitled Jack Ryan film starring Chris Pine will feature in terms of plot, where it might fit amongst the existing films starring Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford and Ben Affleck, and what it will mean for the character.

Now we’ve got a working title — Moscow — and some details about what we might expect from the script. Read More »